Wednesday, June 4, 2014

#AllMenCan?

A lot of the photos on the AllMenCan blog are nice! But also, a lot are not helping and serve as good examples of doing things wrong.

I won't try to tackle the massive amount of "#AllMenCan BE FEMINISTS" -- Meghan Murphy has alreadydone the work in the past and these men should read her. I want to talk about stuff like this:

That's the pressing issue at hand. The past week on Twitter has been pretty much nothing but "#YesAllWomen hate that men can't wear women's clothes!" But really, leave it to us to make this about what we can or can't wear -- and swear and look upset while doing it. The thing is, we men do wear "women's clothes"; it happens all the time. Sometimes though, we're ridiculed and attacked for it. By other men. But our friend in the photo isn't going to talk about the perpetrators...

Let's move on to this creepy fellow:

As if no young woman has ever been the victim of misogyny and male violence at the hands of her brother. How do you type this up, stand at the printer while it spools, and the whole time think "this is exactly what other men need to hear"? We need to dispense with the false strategy of leveraging familial relationships to try to get other men to stop hurting women. At least it's not what this guy came up with:

Oh, so women's value is contingent on the extent to which they provide you with life? How about "choose again". Once again, women's humanity is all about us men, rather than a self-evident fact.

I see a lot of this type of young man (offline and on). With it on the major points but still spouting the "consent is sexy" nonsense. I used to buy into the same slogans and it had to click for me with a short blog post that went something like: "stop saying consent is sexy. we shouldn't have to eroticize my human rights." Once again, we would rather leverage the power of an existing, male institution (sexuality in this case, family in the "little sister" case) to try to get men to stop raping, rather than try to create new power behind the notion that women are people. It's a nice maneuver from a marketing point of view but I don't think rapists are in the market.

There actually aren't that many posts -- you can scroll through the blog in a few minutes. If you're a man, you should try to change that by submitting a photo. Just make sure it's actually about women.